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If you're coming to IBM Innovate 2012 this year, we have an exciting contest planned on Monday of the conference. It's Next vs Now. Four teams of high school and college students (the Next generation) pitting themselves against four teams of conference attendees (the Now generation). This code camp is being taught by RP5 Software , an IBM business partner headquartered in Finland. The camp will teach attendees agile practices using Rational Team Concert, by having teams collaborate to build virtual race cars and then race them against each... [More]

Here is Edward bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head…..It is as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs.. but sometimes he feels that there really is another way…..(A.A Milne, Winnie-their pooh) This is about the paradigm shift or doing things differently! I was recently invited as a speaker for a Business Analyst (BA) Day and my topic was “Do requirements really matter in agile”. Business analysts continue to be challenged to meet rapidly changing business demand and adjust to the agile world.... [More]

I will be speaking at Innovate 2012 on the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Agile Teams ® . The session will be held on Monday, June 4th, 2012, between 3-4pm in "Southern I" @ the Disney Dolphin Hotel. I'd like to share my presentation's topic and start a conversation before, during and after the conference. Let's have innovate all year-round with passionate, smart, agile professionals like yourself! What my presentation is about It is my experience that Agile teams are highly effective when individuals can make a paradigm... [More]

Please take a look at this great talk I'm watching live at IBM Impact. Grady Booch and friends are talking about history of development and the new reality of developing software. The key takeaways for me was the pressure and level of complexity developers are facing in the current era of computing. I remember testing applications for 3 browsers and 2 operating systems built with three or so programming languages. Today developers need to be fluent in 4,5,6 even as many as 10 different languages. I cannot imagine testing today's apps in the... [More]

ScrumMaster® Certification Course (Pre-conference training) – June 2nd and 3rd Come to Innovate early and take advantage of a 2 day ScrumMaster® Certification Course. Scrum is a widely used practice many organizations leverage as a starting point in their Agile transformation. This highly interactive two day session has been designed to give you the ability to experience first-hand what it is like to be part of a Scrum team. This course is high energy and contains numerous exercises that require attendee full participation. Participants who... [More]

Why Agile pilots sometimes fail Many small to medium size projects teams have successfully adopted agile practices such as Scrum but some agile teams do fail. Often as not they fail because of factors outside their control but here are some common reasons why agile project teams fail that are within their control: Not implementing the whole process Scaling Factors not addressed Team not co-located or team governed like a Waterfall project) Team too big or team has strong functional role boundaries Team / Management not committed to Agile... [More]

Innovate 2012will be very special this year! Register here ! Let's face it, IBM Developers don't get out of the office toooften. But when we do, we're lots of fun and thrilled to meet ourcustomers and learn what we can do to help them become more innovative,and improve their experience with our products. We will have tons of stuff to help make your Agile deployments rock and your competitors roll. Below are the 11 Reasons Why Innovateis a must attend event for Developers Make new connections with gaggles of developers – Network and... [More]

Successful agile transformations often times require successful agile pilot projects. Often time a successful initial pilot is the most critical step early in a successful enterprise agile adoption. If the pilot project is a success then the organization has a tangible example to get behind but if the project fails (or just fails to meet expectations) then the entire agile initiative could be derailed by critics. Because no one really likes change unless they are driving it. Agile Pilot Selection Pilot selection is often the most critical... [More]

Target roles: Product Owner and Scrum Master Let's talk about the flavors of velocity and the term 'velocity' itself. Complexity, Value, Risk, and ROI velocity are all important ways to understand how a team, sprint, and release are performing for the Product Owner. Velocity Types: Standard [Complexity] Velocity: Story points / sprint Value... [More]

Mile High Agile 2012 The Agile Mile High event on April 3, 2012 in Denver, Colorado was a huge success. The conference was for agile practitioners at all levels of experience in the Denver region, including those exploring agile for the first time, This one-day action packed conference provides learning opportunities for agile novices, intermediates and experts, technical professionals, team leaders, managers, executives, and organizational change leaders. What was different about this event it is unlike National conferences that require a... [More]

We all know velocity to be the number of story points a team can successfully complete per sprint. Velocity is a thing of beauty. Let’s take a moment to ponder it. It predicts complexity delivered per sprint It predicts release dates It defines and defends a sustainable pace It binds scope It wards off evil vampires … project managers … oh! yes! strike ‘evil’ too. :-) It out performs industrial strengthened Earn Value Management Systems with a white board It and/or the lack of it, shows the health of Sprint Planning Some say it can jump... [More]

Much of the mainstream agile discussion focuses on the construction of straightforward systems by a small, co-located team working in a collaborative and self-organizing manner. Yet we know that there is more to software delivery than just construction, that many teams are neither small nor co-located, and that many teams are working on complex systems within a complex environment. The evidence that agile approaches result in improved time-to-market, improved quality, and improved developer productivity compel us to tailor agile strategies... [More]

The question was asked: "Can you be Agile without doing TDD (test driven development)?" Credits: The original question as well as several excellent answers was posted on (programmers.stackexchange.com) . I encourage you to check those too. Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: In my experience, Agile is about picking the right level of Lean-ness for the project at hand. What do I mean by Lean-ness? And, why do I bring it into this answer? Lean does not mean chopping everything possible out of your method. As one of our... [More]

At some point in time, every software application will go into maintenance where most of the software updates going forward are limited to minor enhancements and bug fixes. While often overlooked, maintenance is an integral part of most IT organizations. Studies have shown that some IT organizations spend as much as 75% of their overall software budgets on software maintenance . While many iT organizations have started using agile practices on projects, the projects usually are fixed iterations, between 2 to 4 weeks, use a single product... [More]

....and then there was this time I deployed Rational ClearQuest across 30 change management processes 15 organizations 6 subcontractors <Names and places are changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike> I spent my first week reading the contract between the government entity and the prime contractor. That was pretty mind numbing (but turned out to be critical later on...) :-D Then one of my three managers walked into my cube and said .... "we have to have an electronic defect tracking tool on project X. We have to have it... [More]